The wrong man was convicted and the killer got away | Editorial

By Sun Sentinel Editorial Board

Mar 27, 2019 | 12:25 PM

Broward State Attorney Mike Satz recently announced that Jack Jones (right) raped and murdered Regina Harrison in 1983, not Ronald Stewart, who was wrongly convicted. Given the many mistakes made in sentencing people to death, Florida should put a moratorium on the death penalty. (Photos: Florida Department of Corrections and The Associated Press)

When the wrong man was sentenced in 1985 for Regina Harrison’s murder, the real killer remained on the loose to rape and murder at least two more women — again in Broward County and in Arkansas, which eventually put him to death.

That’s one of several deeply disturbing implications of the mistake authorities now acknowledge they made in pinning Harrison’s murder on Ronald Henry Stewart, who pleaded no contest to the crime and was sentenced to 50 years.

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As State Attorney Mike Satz announced last week, it was a man named Jack Harold Jones who raped and murdered Harrison in 1983, days after her 20th birthday, near her parents’ home in Hollywood. Jones confessed in a letter to his sister that he sent before his execution in Arkansas two years ago.

DNA testing, not available in 1983, confirmed his guilt and Stewart’s innocence. But Stewart, too, was long dead, having succumbed to cancer in a Mississippi prison while serving nine concurrent 50-year terms, including three from Florida.

Stewart’s wrongful conviction is a study in the many ways that justice can miscarry.

— He was a too-obvious suspect, having already confessed and been sentenced for three of a series of nine Broward rapes. But he hadn’t killed anyone, which distinguished those crimes from Harrison’s murder.

— An artist’s sketch of a man who had been with Harrison produced another witness who said it resembled Stewart, and who picked him from a photo lineup of six pictures. That form of eyewitness identification is notably prone to honest error. Jones, who had seen the sketch, told his sister, “it didn’t look much like me.”

— Without a confession, fingerprints or other hard evidence, the state’s case was weak until convicts who had been jailed with Stewart claimed to have heard him confess the murder. According to the Innocence Project, perjury by jailhouse informants — more colorfully known as snitches — is to blame for one in every five convictions overturned by DNA or other conclusive evidence of innocence.

— Threatened with the death penalty, Stewart figured he had nothing to lose in pleading no contest to a crime he continued to deny as part of an agreement to reduce the charge to second-degree murder and make his sentence run concurrently with the others he was serving.

The bad part of this bargain was to leave a killer on the loose.

Jones raped and strangled Lorraine Anne Barrett, 32, a Pennsylvania tourist at Fort Lauderdale Beach in May 1991, and murdered Mary Phillips at Bald Knob, Arkansas, in June 1995. There’s no way to know whether he would have been caught sooner had Stewart not taken the fall — but with the Harrison case closed, police had no incentive to keep looking.

Even as polls show eroding public support for the death penalty, prosecutors are loath to give up such a powerful cudgel to close cases. So how often does it happen that the threat succeeds in coercing pleas?

According to the Innocence Project, real perpetrators have been identified in 160 of 364 exonerations of people wrongly committed to death row.

Sometimes prosecutors are so unwilling to admit they were wrong that they refuse to charge anyone else even after an innocent person has been set free.

Last December, a judge in Seminole County dismissed all charges against Clemente Javier Aguirre, who had spent 14 years in prison, 10 of them on death row, for the stabbing deaths of two neighbors. The Florida Supreme Court had overturned his conviction on the basis of DNA evidence that excluded him and pointed to the daughter and granddaughter of the victims. She had reportedly confessed the crime to other people. Prosecutors haven’t charged her; they continue to insist that Aguirre was the killer.

In 2005, the Florida Legislature awarded $2 million to Wilton Dedge, a Brevard County man who had spent 22 years in prison, most of it due to a snitch’s perjury, before his exoneration by DNA testing, which the state had resisted. The same informant had sent another man, whom many still believe innocent, to the electric chair.

In 2014, the Florida Supreme Court adopted a rule requiring prosecutors to reveal to the defense everything they know about jailhouse snitches, including how many times they just happen to hear a cellmate brag about a crime. Informant witnesses “constitute the basis for many wrongful convictions,” the court said.

With California Gov. Gavin Newsome having declared a moratorium on executions, Florida now has the nation’s largest active death row — 343 people.

How many of them might have been wrongly convicted? Even one would be unacceptable. Florida should not continue to bear that risk.